Page 26 of Hot Blooded

“I promise I won’t walk in the dark by myself, but the days are getting longer now. The sun is up when I leave work. There’s no reason for you to get hurt.”

His jaw unclenched. “Alright.”

Chapter 7

Amos left Tessa at the staff door of the hospice. She hesitated and, for a moment, he thought she might want to kiss him. But after the way she’d rebuffed him earlier, he decided not to push it.

“Goodnight, Tessa.”

“Goodnight, Amos.”

He spent the early part of the night scouting ever-widening circles around the hospice. He found a thrall almost immediately, only two blocks away, huddled miserably against a steam vent in an alley behind a laundromat. She was dressed in tattered, dirty clothes that hung off her emaciated frame like rags. Her age was impossible to guess. Her face was sunken from starvation and neglect, her hair dark with filth.

“Hello,” Amos said gently.

She looked up at him with terror in her eyes, curling back against the wall as if it could shelter her from Amos. “Please,” she begged hoarsely, her voice barely audible. “Leave me alone.”

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even. Sick, maddening rage threatened to overwhelm him. This was what the Council had turned a blind eye to for centuries. This, done to innocents, over and over again. All because Markov was powerful and old and they were all too cowardly to cross him.

“I’ll go,” the woman said weakly. “I promise. I just… I’m so cold.”

“I want to help you. Will you come with me?”

She closed her eyes, buried her face in her knees. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice fracturing on a sob.

Amos took his anger and shoved it down deep, so he could deal with it later. He took a steadying breath, then cautiously approached the weeping woman, making sure to make enough noise that she heard him coming. He crouched beside her and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. She flinched but didn’t try to run or fight.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “On your feet. I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”

“Somewhere safe” was one of the Council-owned safehouses for “difficult cases,” which included everything from abandoned thralls to vampires who’d been turned as children. By the time he ushered the woman inside, she’d stopped crying. To the attendant who took her from Amos’s custody, she managed to shakily utter her name.

“Thank you,” the house manager, a silver-haired vampire who’d probably been in his fifties or sixties when he’d been turned, told Amos. “She’s the fourth of Markov’s thralls that we’ve recovered so far.”

“Four already?” Amos asked. “That can’t be good news.”

The house manager shook his head, expression grim. “The fact that we’ve found that many so quickly? There are probably dozens out there. Maybe hundreds.”

Amos let out a low hiss of dismay. “We’ll be tracking them down forever.”

The house manager shrugged. “What else can we do?”

Accepting that grim truth, Amos returned to the streets. Before the night was over, he found two more thralls. One was a young man, turned in his late teens or early twenties—another sin to lay at Markov’s feet. Turning anyone below the age of twenty-five had been declared a crime since the Council of Ctesiphon ruled on it in the year 980 C.E. The other thrall was a middle-aged man who had tried his damnedest to run from Amos, frenzied with terror at the sight of him.

It became clear that gathering Markov’s thralls was going to be especially difficult, since all his victims had been conditioned over years and years to fear their sire, and to therefore fear all vampires.

Each time Amos brought one of the thralls to whichever safehouse was nearest, the house managers and attendants all pressed him to consider siring a thrall if they chose to fully turn. Each time, Amos fervently declined. He had no desire for progeny, and he did not want the bond that came with being a sire. He especially did not want a bond with any of Markov’s line.

As the night faded, Amos returned once more to the hospice. Tessa would still be inside, working until after sunrise. He had no hope of seeing her again that night, but just knowing he was near her soothed a primitive part of his psyche.

The hunger for her was sharpening into something feral. The urge to hunt her, to watch her from the darkness, to wait for his opportunity to pounce, to hear her gasp as he seized her, to hear her cry of fear turn into moans of pleasure as his teeth sank into her flesh… it was all becoming impossible to ignore. Each feeding ratcheted that need higher. Every other aspect of Tessa—her sweetness, her strength, her playful humor—intensified the possessiveness. Every conversation with her, every non-sexual intimacy they shared, called to the jealous, acquisitive side of his nature.

He tried to keep himself in check, but this feeling was something deeper than attraction or affection. It came from a primordial part of his brain that would not be reasoned with or shamed into better behavior. And as his higher mind grew fonder of her, it became less inclined to restrain the monstrous parts of him that wanted to take and consume and claim.

But if he was going to have any hope of keeping her, he couldn’t surrender to those impulses. He needed to control himself. He needed to be the kind of man Tessa wanted and deserved. He couldn’t allow himself to be a monster even if, deep in his heart of hearts, a monster was what he truly was.

Chapter 8

Wednesday was the first day Tessa had off from work at the hospice, but was still scheduled to see Amos. It was the first time Amos would see her in anything other than scrubs, and she was staring into her open closet, at a loss. As time ran out, she finally settled on her favorite pair of jeans—comfortable, while still somehow managing to hug the curves of her ass and hips with utter devotion—and a bright red, delicately-knit wrap sweater that hinted less-than-demurely at the full glory of her breasts, and tied snugly around the tidy nip of her waist.

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